Donald Kennedy Quotations

There is no question in our minds that the stem cell paper published 19 May 2005 by the journal Science needs to be retracted.

We're sort of pondering what they mean by research misbehavior, which is not in anybody's anthology of terms about research impropriety.

There are enormous pressures to be extremely productive and at the top of the heap.

The process benefits enormously from the kind of candor that results when referees know that their identity is held in confidence.

Since we do not yet have sufficient information to proceed with the retraction, we are issuing this statement so that readers are aware that concerns have been raised about the validity of the data in this paper.

He has made it much more of a place that has a plan and a vision about its own role and its own future, ... Plainly, Caltech has flourished. I dreamed he would have gone on forever.

He got out with just the clothes on his back.

I think it's a 'sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander' proposition. If you're going to be a full co-author and share in the credit for an accomplishment, then you have to take the fall if it's wrong.

It is a recipe only in the sense that 'catch a turtle' is the recipe for turtle soup,

It is clear the authors are going to need to provide more details as to where the errors lie and how they arose.

We don't see them as a threat, but possibly as a competitor,

We carefully considered the implications of publishing this research and concluded that the knowledge we're gaining to potentially protect public health far outweighs the risk of working with the virus.

We are doing a systematic review of the editorial history of both papers and our procedures for evaluating them, to search for ways in which we might improve those. I have pointed out in the past that even unusually rigorous peer review of the kind we undertook in this case may fail to detect cases of well-constructed fraud. To support this effort, we are calling on outside experts, including members of our Board of Reviewing Editors and our Senior Editorial Board.

We are determined to do everything in our power to evaluate our own procedures for detecting research misconduct.

We were just really rejoicing thinking that this brother is alive.

Today, science's most profound questions address some of the largest phenomena in the cosmos and some of the smallest. We may never fully answer some of these questions, but we'll advance our knowledge and society in the process of trying,

Academic freedom really means freedom of inquiry. To be able to probe according to one's own interest, knowledge and conscience is the most important freedom the scholar has, and part of that process is to state its results.

This is really a twin tragedy, both for the people who were misled over there, and for those of us who were misled over here.

So here's the situation confronting the drug firms: The drugs cost more to make, but they can't charge more for them. What do they do? Increasingly, the U.S. market is driving them toward drugs aimed at the diseases of richer, older Americans and away from antimicrobials, vaccines, and the like.

A lot of disappointed people have been left standing on the street corner waiting for the bus marked Perfection.

We assumed a certain level of familiarity there and I wasn't about to argue with an agreement among co-authors about order. I don't like complimentary co-authorship and would have asked, I think, if it had occurred to me.

We are very, very thankful for the acts of kindness.

We are going to be giving that paper careful scrutiny, guided by what we can learn in the course of time about the 2005 one and what went wrong there.

At the time of publication, we felt on ethically solid ground.

There's no possibility at all of that. It's held under the kinds of conditions the Centers for Disease Control specifies for select agents.

Science is publishing this study because it provides information necessary for developing drugs and vaccines that could help prevent another global flu pandemic. We carefully considered the implications of publishing this research and concluded that the knowledge we're gaining to potentially protect public health far outweighs the risk of working with this virus.

Scientific fraud is not new to us. It is not rare, but it is not common either. It happens at a frequency that's high enough to bother certainly people in the United States Congress, and probably others as well. But it is not frequent enough to declare that because the peer review system cannot reliably detect it, something has to be done about the peer review system. I think the peer review system is not quite fine, but absolutely the best thing we have.

As Science celebrates its 125th birthday, we've recognized that an examination of science's outstanding mysteries also reflects its tremendous accomplishments.

It used to be there was a chain store here and there and 'independents' all around. It's the reverse now.

In a way it was a bad year for evolution, given what happened in Kansas and Dover and lots of other places. But at the same time, it was a really good year for evolution research, really in every area of biology.

The Lord just smiled on us about that.